Join the Bates Center for THEN WITH A GRAVE FACE PRESCRIBE”: MARGARET HILL MORRIS’ AUTHORITATIVE HEALING PRACTICE, 1779-1815”
Abstract: The American Revolution challenged Quaker healer Margaret Hill Morris’ economic and religious independence. Morris had previously provided medical and nursing services gratis for her family and community. However, in response to war-related financial reverses, she opened a medical and apothecary business in Burlington, New Jersey in 1779 to maintain her financial autonomy. In her practice, Morris diagnosed, prescribed, dispensed medicines, and provided personal nursing care. Her patients and prominent Delaware Valley physicians respected her healing acumen. Morris’ political loyalty resided in the transatlantic Quaker community and its commitment to pacifist neutrality. American Revolutionary authorities considered pacifism treason, and officials imprisoned several of Morris’ Quaker friends. Despite this political backlash, Morris remained committed to the Quaker peace testimony and she practiced her beliefs by providing healthcare to both British and American soldiers. I intertwine the understudied historiographies of women healers, the medical marketplace, and Quakers’ Revolutionary politics to argue that Morris rejected political partisanship and instead sought personal independence in her calling as a Quaker healer. I analyze Morris’ healing recipe book, diaries, and papers alongside those of healers with similar practices to recover the ways that female practitioners constructed healing authority, provided health care, and circulated medical knowledge in their communities and across transatlantic spaces. This paper is excerpted from my dissertation, which examines laywomen healers’ pivotal role in the consumer-driven eighteenth and early nineteenth-century medical marketplace. Women like Morris laid the foundation for nineteenth-century women’s practices as Thomsonian herbalists, water cure practitioners, health educators, and ultimately professional nurses and physicians.

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